AI headlines: AI film storms streaming charts, autonomous agents save weekend after IT outage

The CRM giant Salesforce announced this morning its intention to acquire the (previously relatively unknown) AI startup NexGen Flow for approximately $12 billion.

Why this deal? NexGen Flow is considered a leader in “autonomous enterprise agents”—AI systems that can handle complex business processes (such as invoicing, customer support escalation, or lead qualification) completely independently and across different systems.

The competition: Analysts see this as a direct challenge to Microsoft’s Copilot dominance in everyday office work. Salesforce aims to transform its platform from a purely administrative tool into an active, autonomous employee. The stock market reacted positively, with Salesforce shares rising 4% in pre-market trading.

An alliance of 20 leading European universities (including the Technical University of Munich and ETH Zurich) today announced a far-reaching reform of their curricula.

The New Element: Starting next winter semester, a module on “Applied AI Competence” will be mandatory for all degree programs – from mechanical engineering to philosophy.

The Content: It’s not just about programming, but primarily about the effective use of AI tools in the respective field, the recognition of “AI hallucinations” (errors), and the ethical implications.

The Reason: The university presidents justified this with the massive pressure from the job market. Graduates without sound AI application skills are becoming increasingly difficult to place (a direct consequence of the trends we observed last week).

Following last week’s discussions about the enormous electricity consumption of AI data centers, Iceland is now offering a solution. The government has approved the construction of the “Viking Compute Cluster.”

The Project: It is intended to become one of the world’s largest data center parks specifically for training massive AI models.

The Advantage: It will operate entirely on inexpensive geothermal and hydroelectric power. Thanks to the cool climate, very little energy will be needed to cool the servers. Several large US tech companies have already secured capacity to improve their carbon footprints.

This Monday continues the major themes of last week: The Salesforce deal is the economic response to the technological “agent trend” we saw in travel on Saturday. The university reform is a direct consequence of the changing job market (topic from November 3rd), and Iceland is supplying the hardware infrastructure for the ongoing boom.